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Attend a 50-minute seminar exploring the transition to turbulence in pipe flows through the lens of directed percolation theory. Examine how shear flows like pipe, channel, and Couette flow undergo turbulence transitions that deviate from standard linear-instability paradigms, where laminar states remain linearly stable yet finite perturbations can trigger instability. Discover how turbulence manifests near onset as spatially confined, statistically identical structures called "puffs" that convect downstream and interact weakly through stochastic decay and reproduction events. Learn how the spatiotemporal dynamics of turbulence can be reduced to an effectively one-dimensional system of point-particles, and explore how statistics, correlations, spreading rates, and turbulent flow fractions follow power-law scaling that matches critical exponents of the Directed Percolation universality class. Understand how this establishes the transition as a second-order nonequilibrium phase transition, with presentation of experimental evidence for laminar-turbulent intermittency and the theoretical models that capture these phenomena.
